Friday, October 3, 2014

Poisoned atmosphere

A Paper Tiger?

Making a quick search on the Hebrew
Google for "Netanyahu" + "Holocaust" I found 204,000
results. A search for the same in English turned up no less than 3,940,000possibilities. Holocaust references
keep coming up in the speeches of the Prime Minister of Israel, in many
different contexts.

A thought experiment: suppose
the State of Israel had had the great misfortune to go through fifty days of
war in the course of which 2100 Israelis were killed, including more than five
hundred children, and in which whole neighborhoods in Tel Aviv were razed to
the ground and hundreds of thousands left homeless. Assuming all of that, would
PM Netanyahu have referred to such a horror in his speech at the UN, a month
later? An affirmative answer is virtually certain. Would he have used the very strongest
terms in talking of it? That, too, seems quite a safe bet. But would the word
"Holocaust" have cropped up in Netanyahu's speech, in such a case? On
the basis of known facts, there is a high probability for that as well.

In actual reality, with no
need hypothetical assumptions, it was Mahmoud Abbas who mounted the podium at
the UN General Assembly on behalf of the Palestinian People and made ​​a speech
full of anger and bitterness about what his people in Gaza had gone through
last summer. So, he spoke not only of murder and war crimes, but of genocide
which is, however horrible the death toll was, too big a word.

It was Binyamin Netanyahu who
immediately set out for New York to make a furious rebuttal to Abu Mazen’s “speech
of lies and incitement". He had come to the General Assembly to tell the world the
truth and nothing but the truth: The Israel Defense Forces are the most moral
army in the world bar none; it is the Palestinians
and only them who are guilty of war crimes in Gaza; Hamas is ISIS and ISIS is
Hamas and Iran is both Hamas and ISIS, they are all the same, they are all
malevolent Muslim extremists and enemies of humanity against whom all-out war
should be fought. And since Mahmoud Abbas had established a Government of Reconciliation
jointly with Hamas, he is actually also Hamas, which essentially means he is
ISIS too, and anyway he is a Holocaust denier and certainly is not a partner.
How nice and pleasant not to have a Palestinian partner any more, no one to
whom occupied territories have to be given up.

Unlike previous years, in this
year’s UN speech, Netanyahu did not bother to include – even as a lip service - the words "A Palestinian
State." But he did utter these words at the meeting with President Obama
in Washington two days later, and there he also reiterated his sincere wish and
aspiration to achieve peace with the Palestinians. It can be assumed that neither
Netanyahu nor Obama took these words very seriously.

Obama was probably considering
the meeting with Netanyahu as a piece of nuisance, unavoidable especially in view
of the proximity of the critical mid-term Congressional elections – to be
gotten through so that he could get back to the very urgent business of the war
in Iraq and Syria into which he had very reluctantly entered. But just during
that meeting there arrived across the ocean an urgent message from the Peace
Now movement in Israel, which is regularly monitoring the fine print of the bureaucratic
processes involved in approving construction. Precisely on the eve of the Prime
Minister’s visit to the White House, the Jerusalem Municipality promoted the creation
of a large new settlement neighborhood at a key position in Palestinian East
Jerusalem.

Furthermore, just ahead of
the meeting in the White House, dozens of Israeli settlers accompanied by a
heavy police escort, invaded dozens of Palestinian homes in the Palestinian
neighborhood of Silwan, south of the Jerusalem Old City wall. One of the
residents who tried to prevent their entry got beaten up by police who told him
"Go to Gaza".

The settlers claimed that
they had legally bought the houses from their owners - an assertion which is
very difficult to validate, as the alleged sellers have disappeared.

Anyway, Housing Minister Uri
Ariel did not really care about the problems of legality. Just at the time when
the Prime Minister sat down in the White House, expressing to the President his
desire for peace with the Palestinians, his Housing Minister conducted a visit of his own to the settlers
in Silwan, “in order to strengthen and encourage them". With his own hands
the Minister affixed a mezuzah to the doorpost of a house which had been a Palestinian
residence twenty-four hours earlier, so as to express that it would be a strictly
Jewish home henceforward. "Now dozens of new families can come and
significantly increase the Israeli grip and sovereignty over the City of David and
its environs. Settlement in Jerusalem will continue full force, throughout the
city. Abbas had never been a partner and is not a partner now, instead of engaging
in the pursuit of peace fantasies we should sustain the settlement effort all
over the country. We are ready to immediately offer for sale thousands of housing units in Jerusalem and in
Judea and Samaria, and I expect it would become possible on the PM’s return
from his visit to the United States."

Two hours later, the White
House spokesperson published a statement of strong condemnation summing up the Israeli
Prime Minister's visit:

“Israel’s plan to continue construction
in a sensitive area of East Jerusalem is poisoning the atmosphere - not only
with the Palestinians, but also with the very Arab governments with which Prime
Minister Netanyahu said he wanted to build relations. This leads to serious doubts
as to Israel's commitment to peace. I can say that the United States is deeply concerned.
Israel might face international condemnation, even from its closest allies, if it
proceeds with this massive new housing project in East Jerusalem.”

Veteran commentator Sima
Kadmon made some skeptical comments at her column in the weekend Yedioth
Ahronoth. "In the beginning of his term, Netanyahu was very apprehensive
about a confrontation with Obama and the potential implications of such a conflict
on Israel-US relations. But after several such confrontations, including one in
which the Israeli PM lectured the US President in the White House itself,
Netanyahu revealed that the sky did not fall. On the contrary, in some such contests
Netanyahu emerged the winner".

This week, the Palestinians implemented
the plan they had been talking of already for some time, formally presenting to
the UN Security Council the text of a draft resolution which would require
Israel to end the occupation within two years, thus preventing Israeli military
rule from reaching its fiftieth anniversary in 2017. When this text comes to a vote
in a few weeks, will the American Ambassador's hand be raised once again to
cast an automatic veto on behalf of Netanyahu?

The term "paper
tiger" is an ancient Chinese expression. In the West it had become known
especially due to a statement of Mao Zedong in 1956: "In
appearance America is
very powerful, but in reality it is nothing to be afraid of. America is a paper tiger. Outwardly a
tiger, it is made of paper, unable to withstand wind and rain."